By Erica James-King, Staff ReporterWESTERN BUREAU:
AT LEAST $1 billion in loan-financing must be made available to beef farmers if the struggling beef industry is to survive, investors in the sector have warned.
In sounding the alarm, farmers islandwide are insisting that the loans should not attract anything above single-digit interest rates, stating that to do otherwise would be counter-productive.
"I don't see how farmers are going to get their beef production up unless they have access to at least $1 billion in loans and with a long-term repayment schedule," said Henry Rainford, managing director of the Jamaica Livestock Association, and a cattle farmer for 30 years.
"It will require at least $40,000 to resuscitate each pasture, and the beef farmers who have been taking a beating for the longest while do not have that kind of money. Government needs to devise a scheme to allow them to move forward with improving the pastures."
He said provisions should be made to assist farmers to increase their herd stock. "For the last few years many of the farmers have been slaughtering their main stock just to survive," Mr. Rainford said. "It might well be that it might take five to 10 years for them to build their herds back to the size which they were, five to 10 years ago."
The demand by the farmers is a direct response to recent urgings by Roger Clarke, the Agriculture Minister, for cattle farmers to upgrade their pastures to expand production and take advantage of what, he said, has been an increased demand for local beef. The demand, Mr. Clarke said, has been heightened by the temporary ban placed by his Ministry on the importation of United States (U.S.) beef. The ban was a result of a reported case of the Mad Cow disease detected in the U.S.
Both the Jamaica Livestock Association and the Jamaica Red Poll Cattle Breeders' Society are pointing to the chronic shortage of cattle stock, which they say, has worsened over the last six years.
They blame the plummeting figures on the fact that during the last six years, many farmers, out of frustration, had either slaughtered or neglected their herds.
Census of Agriculture figures for 1996 showed that there were 282,800 heads of cattle in the island. However, according to the Jamaica Cattle Breeders' Society, the figure since then has fallen by at least 50 per cent.
"Many farmers couldn't even afford to keep their animals penned in because of the GCT on barbed wire. Then, to fertilise the pastures, there was also taxes and price increases on that," bemoaned Martin Hopwood, owner of Bengal Estates on the Trelawny-St. James border.
"There were thousands and thousands of heads of cattle in Trelawny and the farms were vibrant in employing hundreds of people. Today, the cattle industry is probably 25 per cent of what it used to be, the farms have been abandoned," said Mr. Hopwood, indicating the frustrating turn that the cattle industry had taken before the ban on U.S. beef was announced.
He noted that among the farms in Trelawny that had either been abandoned or put into other forms of production were Long Pond, Bryan Castle, Braco and Whales Pond.
Colin Wright, also a cattle farmer, from Hanover, believes special incentives are needed for beef farmers, if the sector is to be rescued.
"Right now, with the price being good for beef, dairy farmers might actually yield to the temptation of slaughtering their cattle and that would destroy the Jamaica Hope dairy herd, which this country was the first to breed," Mr. Wright said. "So dairy farmers, too, need some incentives or else they could destroy the best milk- producing breed in the world."
